Today's culture is becoming more technology-centric. Traditional lines denoting the bounds of professional and personal portions of our lives are quickly dissolving with the predominance of cellular telephones, pagers, portable digital assistants (PDA), as well as pervasive and remote e-mail systems. These devices and systems provide the technologies for remote access and/or notification for an end user.
These devices and systems (hereinafter referred to as portable devices) are technical advances that provide many benefits, but can also be distractions to the user as well as to others in the vicinity. For example, users, such as doctors and information technology staff, who spend time “on call”, for example, are able to enjoy the ability to be connected while at a remote location. This provides the user with many advantages such as, for example, the ability to travel without the worry that an important telephone call or email will be missed.
However, considerate and proper use of these devices often necessitates that their operating mode be changed to reflect the user's current environment. As an example, during a meeting, it is generally considered best to change the notification profile of a cellular telephone from audio notification (e.g., ring) to physical notification (e.g., vibration mode) to reduce the disruption of an incoming call to others within the meeting. Furthermore, most users have experienced ringing telephones during other inopportune times such as in a movie or restaurant, as well as having missed calls when the cellular telephone has been left on vibrate.
While it is true that most cellular telephones, pagers and other portable type devices have the ability to be changed from audio to physical notification (i.e., modified to vibrate instead of beep using a profile defined on a portable device), doing so requires that the user manually induce both the initial setting (i.e., from ring to vibrate) and back to the original notification setting (i.e., from vibrate to ring) as the environment changes for the user. Changing a notification profile of a portable device is not overly complicated, but the user can easily forget to change the notification profile, leading to unnecessary, avoidable disruption to others or missed calls, emails, pages, etc. Making such manual changes can be time consuming and, to a certain extent, may still be complicated for the unsophisticated user. For example, in some applications, the user may have to navigate through many scroll-down windows, options, etc., merely to change the profile from “ring” to “vibrate”.
Accordingly, there exists a need in the art to overcome the deficiencies and limitations described hereinabove.